On the flats of the ski hill, a toddler in a green apple onesie inches forward on the wide planchette of its rental skis. YEAHHHHHH, yells an adult in its face. SEND ITTT!
I am in line for the single chair with my friend J, discussing Heated Rivalry, and how nice it must be to fall in love with someone who has your exact same interests. You know who shares our interests? Our girlfriends. If we all partnered up, we could be doing crafts and eating picky bits every night. “Tragically, I love dick,” J says with an air of melancholy. Then we load our chairs separately with our thoughts, dangling over kids throwing 360s off cliffs. One clears two drops then explodes into the snow. I pass over top as I hear the kid say to himself, “that was sick.”
Across the hill, people meet the limits of their capabilities: they send their meat and suffer the consequences. Here is how skiing works: You decide at the top of the hill what your line will be, whether you’ve shuffled off the magic carpet or are peering over an icefall. You manage to stick to the line, or you don’t, sometimes finding you’re spectacularly wide of the plan, the mountain snatching the skis from your feet and flinging them about like popsicle sticks. Sometimes you follow the line but wind up somewhere you didn’t expect. (This is also how life works.)
The kids are in a ski program, so it is our job to stand at the bottom of the hill and wait for them to reappear at intervals throughout the day. Scout comes out of the trees, her mind two blades cutting through the snow. Japhy comes after and pools at my feet. “He had a lot of falls today,” says his instructor. “Probably pretty tired.”
Japhs has been practicing his drops.
I’m riding the chairlift with him when I let out a “shit.” Our arrangement is he gets a free swear when I let one loose. His mittens rest on the safety bar as he yells out, KISS! MY! DICK!
In the ski cabin we’ve rented, Noodles, J, J’s husband, and I somehow turn to the topic of dumpster diving—you’d be surprised how many people with healthy salaries partake. Japhs hears us talking about it and pipes up. Every time we go to Hannaford he tries to get me to pull around back because his friend told him about all the good stuff they get there. “You go out to the bottom of the bin and there’s cake,” explains Japhy, who is probably not wrong.
When I worked at Pier 1, we weren’t allowed to put damaged furniture out back if it was salvageable—management asked us to smash it to bits with an axe. Capitalism. We could all be eating cake.
*
After the ski trip, I had to go to the city for my job. I stayed with my friends Nightbitch and M, who have been without heat since January—not a massive concern since they live in a terrace and can leach from their neighbors. The lack of heat, though, means they don’t have hot water, and have been bathing themselves, and their three children, under a camping shower for two months.
One of the quirks of the bag shower is it makes it more inconspicuous to not shower in the morning, since filling up the bag is a group activity. I’m otherwise a semi-reluctant showerer due to extreme overload in all parts of life, but couldn’t turn down the offer of a hot shower in the a.m.
Thus, here I was following Nitghtbitch and his kettle into the upstairs bathroom. “Sssss close the door!” he waved at the bathroom door, which is kept shut to trap the toasty air from the space heater.
Safe inside the bathroom, Nightbitch bent through the frame of the sliding shower doors and over the rim of the bath tub, lowering the mouth of the shower bag to the tap and giving me a lesson in how to set ‘er up.
“Start with a base,” he explained as cold water blarped into the bladder.
Then he angled the tea kettle over the rim of the bath, directing the spout into the black hole. Steam billowed up. Nightbitch’s bathroom cooking show.
“Top it off with some cold,” he continued, hunched over the bag—getting heavy now—and reaching for the tap again. Then he screwed in the cap and shook the bag of different temperatures of water. “Give it a mix.”
He hung a cable from the shower head and the bag unfurled like a manta ray with a shimmering tail of PVC. “You’ll want to watch this bit,” he pointed to the tubing with his eyebrows up. “That’ll be cold.”
The good news is you don’t need to wait for a bag shower to get hot. When you’re ready, you just yank the nozzle and out comes the spray with surprising pressure, easy to angle and spritz upwards. You might like to pause mid-shower to soap up, lest you run out of bag before you’re clear of suds. Then you can recommence the ritual, directing the flow up to your face or down to your legs. At the end, you might like to crouch under the waning flow as the pressure drains and then is gone. From there, you must face the music: the shower is over and you must get out into the semi-warm air (thank you, space heater) and towel off.
The Summer shower(TM) has the air of “there’s a cat in the wall” and yet there is something touching in the way Nightbitch is hauling that kettle up the stairs a dozen times a week for his children. They’re one of the great families, they really are. When I stay over, I wake up to the insane conversations his girls have from their triple bunk at 6:30 a.m., stacked on top of each other like differently embossed volumes in a boxed set.
“It’s not so bad, right?” he says in the kitchen afterward about the shower.
Then he looks at the floor and admits to himself. “It’s getting a bit old.”
Did I mention Nightbitch is a coworker? My shower videos were the toast of the office that day. “You didn’t tell anyone about how warm our house was,” he complained.
Out of nowhere, I remembered a coworker who went on a silent retreat with her husband late in her pregnancy. One of those yoga places where you’re supposed to just meditate all day. It struck me it wasn’t like she wasn’t not talking to her baby while she was there—somehow you’re always in conversation when they’re in your belly—just her husband, whom none of us liked anyway.
Japhs: First things first. (something new he says now)
THE FUTURE BOOK, new from Mac Barnett and Shawn Harris, hit the spot this week for my advanced readers/elite comedians Scout and Japhy (I don’t care how old they are, I’m going to keep buying picture books):
Also some reluctant reader list led my 9-year-old to the treasure trove that is Carl Hiassan’s MG stuff—start with Squirm. (Or I guess, Hoot, which is more well known.) Excellent notions all.
“Maybe Waxpal could have saved me from myself. But as an American I know I cannot undo past brutality. I can only make the same mistakes over and over and over.” —Dia Lupo
“The person living somewhere under that artificially stupefied facade has made the decision that everything would be easier if they just opted out the social contract of having a face.” —Catherine Lacey
“These people are exhausting, I know, but we have to learn about them because we live in the world they predicted and then created. To be fair they did say that it would suck—it’s the one thing they got right.” —Rusty Foster
Every now and then, I re-read Ariel Levy’s article on Jo Cameron, the Scottish woman who doesn’t feel pain (or anxiety). This time, i was struck by her memory of her father, whom she thought had the same condition:
“He was the kindest man you’ll ever meet. Every morning he’d wake us with a cup of tea and a carrot from the garden and tell us a poem.” Then he’d accompany Cameron to school, hand in hand and skipping all the way.
Nearly forgot that I reported on ~hot people~ in Australia for the New York Times (free link), would like to brag that my dad’s favo(u)rite economist and fellow hot Aussie Justin Wolfers tweeted it out.
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